Fuck Nintendo. All they have done is ensure I never buy one of their products again.
Same! In fact, I have a switch, but tears of the kingdom was the last thing I bought for it.
I’ve skipped everything else. It’s not worth supporting an evil company.
I will always say this in these “Nintendo shuts down beloved fan project” threads: why don’t the people working on these projects operate anonymously and release via torrent? I feel like I’ve been reading the same story for 20 years. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone at this point that Nintendo will come after you.
Because emulation is legal. It shouldn’t have to be hidden. This was taken through the courts in 2001 with the Sony vs Bleem lawsuit.
What appears to be happening is Nintendo is abusing its power and money to make threats of legal action that these groups just can’t afford to fight, even though they haven’t done anything illegal. It should be coming as a surprise that Nintendo is coming for them, because this is completely legal, and not some fan game using Nintendo IP (which is what they normally shut down).
Legal in the US. I think this guy is in Brazil.
Is nintendo the source of the “come to brazil” meme? 🤔
The Sony verdict didn’t establish emulation as legal
At most you find that it established using mods/creating derivatives is illegal
And on the low end it found that using pictures from competitors in advertising as comparison isn’t illegal
From what u understood It’s a bit more complicated than that. Emulation is rather not illegal and in very thin ground.
That sounds like grounds for some kind of legal action. Antitrust? Class action? I don’t know the specifics of the best strategy for approaching it, but if Nintendo is showing a pattern of using their legal team to harass legally operating emulator developers that sounds like something that should be actionable.
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This is like if a pedestrian gets struck by a car while on a crosswalk. Yeah, they were allowed to be there… but they should have looked both ways before crossing the street.
This is a case of people being idealistic rather than practical.
Incidentally, this is a perfect example, because the automotive industry ran a series of ad campaigns to change public sentiment after cars got more common and children and elderly citizens started dying in the streets.
Nintendo is working equally hard to change public sentiment against the innocent.
Source: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
You’re talking about blame assignment, but I am instead referring to the fact that in both the Nintendo and the automotive example that somebody got smacked because they weren’t careful enough.
Somebody got smacked because they were told that this was a safe area to be in. Then they get hit, and are blamed for not being careful enough in the area they were told was safe to be in.
Like I said above, everyone coming through here is so obsessed with talking about blame and fault. That’s not what I’m talking about at all. I’m saying that if Ryujinx wanted to avoid this outcome, they should have done things differently.
See, no mention of blame at all. How else do I need to spell things out for the extremely autistic and pedantic crowd here?
if Ryujinx wanted to avoid this outcome, they should have done things differently
How do you not read this as blame? Or, is this not the same as “they had it coming, wouldn’t have happened if they’d been dressed in armour or hadn’t gone down that street alone” which is often known as victim blaming.
Oh, there’s a wiki article on that. It has a section on the thing you’re arguing about, with cars and pedestrians Neat. Maybe this is why people are talking about it.
Being right and being suddenly under a car are not mutually exclusive.
ITT: people not understanding the difference between BLAME and OUTCOME and downvoting you because of it. Incidentally, I also read a thread earlier today that talked about declining literacy in adults…
Emulation might be legal, but it’s software specifically designed to run illegal copies of the games.
I dislike Nintendo, but I can’t blame them for taking down that kind of software development. They’re still selling many of their old games through their own store for their own emulators. They’re perhaps charging way too much for it and/or lock it behind a subscription wall, even if you ever bought the original copies. Absolute garbage business practice, but from the corporate point of view I can see why they go after emulators. Especially since it’s easier to take those down than trying to go after all digital emulator copies of the games (if not impossible).
They’re probably gonna try and set an example to scare off others trying to make new emulators too.
Edit: lol people really are shooting the messenger here.
Also, the amount of excuses that people have to make backups of their already purchased games is very weak. You damn well know that a vast majority of people don’t use it for such reasons, the amount of people that still own original copies, and also have the hardware to even extract software for personal use must be like less than a percentage of the entire community using emulators. They’re just people pirating games they never paid for. It’s very naive to assume otherwise.
That may be the main reason why people use or even create emulators, but there are still legitimate uses for emulators. It’s like banning couples from riding the same motorcycle because two people on a bike is usually a robbery.
Nice metaphor, is it your original?
Is it illegal to copy your own Nintendo games?
It is not illegal to make backup copies for yourself of games you have purchased and own.
As shitty as it is, yes.
To be fair, it’s software specifically designed to run digital backups of what’s supposed to be personally owned media. It just so happens that it’s very easy to obtain a copy otherwise, but there’s nothing inherently illegal about it or the games.
Strong arming independent projects, and individual developers especially, that are very careful to not endorse that, effectively holding them accountable for others, is morally questionable at best.
From a theoretical point of view, emulators of modern consoles may actually be illegal. Under the DMCA, emulation for preservation is protected as a periodically-renewed exemption list defined by the library of congress. But, (paraphrasing) “creating or distributing any hardware or software device—or component of such—designed to circumvent DRM technology” is still illegal irrespective of any exemptions. A reasonable (and bullshit) interpretation of that means that any emulator which is capable of bypassing any DRM features (such as decrypting ROM using user-provided keys) is a violation under the act.
I say theoretical because it hasn’t ever actually been tested in a court. Nintendo v. Tropic Haze LLC nearly gave us the answer, but the latter chose to settle instead.
What do you think emulation is?
Copying your own copy of a game and using tools for compatibility is what we’re talking about, is protected, and already has the case law demonstrating so.
I can’t blame them for taking down that kind of software development.
Your not being able to blame them is completely irrelevant. Nintendo can not like stuff all it wants. The question is if it is LEGAL. If it is, and it is, your defense of their actions is a defense of the argument that they should be above the law because they don’t like something, and that’s an absolutely TERRIBLE position to take. You don’t need to white knight for Nintendo. They have more money than God and taking up their fights for them against your own rights as a consumer is so far beyond Stockholm Syndrome that I don’t think we even have a word for it yet.
Feel like you failed to read and grasp what I said.
Never said I agreed with what they’re doing, I am not white knighting them. I frankly don’t give a shit what Nintendo does and doesn’t and what they’ll lose over it.
I was just stating an observation from a business point of view.
It’s also legal to own guns in some countries, doesn’t make it legal to use it to just shoot at anything, and it’s even more ridiculous to assume that everyone buying/owning guns has good intentions. There are many countries where owning a gun isn’t legal, as well as making copies of products you’ve bought, even for personal backup.
And to believe that people use emulation exclusively for their own backups is insanely naive.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt that maybe I didn’t grasp what you said, but reading your reply it seems like I grasped it fine.
Here’s the thing. People use emulators for piracy. That is also COMPLETELY and totally irrelevant to the discussion. The right to developing emulators is well-established, and game preservation isn’t even the most important consequence. The right to developing emulators is what allows virtualization that forms the backbone of server architecture, as well as running legacy code from old architectures on modern hardware, alleviating the need for thousands of man hours in rewriting tried and tested code. 20 years in the future, when the IoTs stupidity litters millions of homes with inaccessible, useless plastic garbage, emulation of no longer supported control units will be a panacea.
Nintendo is totally free to not like the law, but it is the law, and this pressure to shut down these projects is a flagrant violation of the developers’ legal rights, which regardless of the morality of piracy is a disgusting flouting of the legal system.
People use guns to murder, yes. But whether you or I think it’s correct or not, the law does not hold gun makers liable for the things their users do with them. We can’t just DECIDE that there are exceptions to the law and begin prosecuting or acting as if they are liable. That requires either a new law or an interpretation by a court to set a precedent - not lawyers sending a cease and desist to Smith & Wesson. That is a slippery slope to an absolutely nightmarish dystopia.
There is no justifying this in a “Well, I can see why they did it…” sense any more than in a murder case. The law is clear. The established rights of the developers are clear. The right to make a Switch emulator is NOT Nintendo’s right to give or deny like a trademark dispute or the ability to make a fan game. They don’t GET a say. The right to make an emulator is explicitly YOURS by LAW. And a giant corporation has taken their money and used it to violate established rights with threat of bankruptcy in violation of that established law. If you believe in the rule of law, no matter what you think of piracy, that should be utterly haunting.
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If guns are sold legally, it means that there is the assumption that everyone buying them has good intentions.
It is made for various things like game development. When my company was working on remastering a GameCube game, Nintendo themselves handed us a devkit, and we used the dolphin emulator to play the original game and compare gameplay and performance.
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Nintendo didn’t put legal pressure on emulator devs for decades at this point, which made devs less cautious about preserving their pseudonymity.
Now it’s too late and they can’t stop Nintendo from finding out who they are and which mistakes they did at some point over the years.
Maybe a new generation of emulator developers will be more protective of their identity, by using hosting providers like Njalla or privacy networks like i2p. The latter would limit access (as it requires i2p), which isn’t desirable for most users.
While that’s true, it’s incredibly reductive to a baseline of “nintendo should win because they are powerful and others aren’t”
How many of these emulators were shut down through legal action or threat of legal action? I mean, the list goes on and on
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PlayStation_emulators
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PlayStation_2_emulators
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PlayStation_3_emulators
https://www.ppsspp.org/
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PlayStation_Vita_emulators
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Xbox_emulators
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Xbox_360_emulatorsOh right, this happened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corp.
Nintendo is using every action possible to stop switch emulation, because, unlike other console companies, they don’t produce any advanced or specific hardware anymore, and they purely survive through their IP.
And because these are never finished projects. People can rant and rave about cloning the git all day, but without active, knowledgeable developers with the knowledge of the original dev team, these projects are dead. It’s not about using the emulators as they exist today… it’s about continuing to keep them working going forward. Anything that releases in the last year or two of the Switch’s life is now at risk of being lost forever into Nintendo’s archives.
Anything that releases in the last year or two of the Switch’s life is now at risk of being lost forever into Nintendo’s archives.
Somebody will archive it, for two reasons: 1) data hoarders and 2) hacked Switches.
Sure, it will be as playable as it is right now, right as the project shuts down. Any updates or improvements? Any new games? Only if someone else takes up the mantle and risks having world police nintendo suing them
I assume emulator development will continue eventually. Who knows when that will be, though.
The thing that sucks is that I’m in the middle of a couple of games, so if something upgrades and Ryujinx isn’t compatible, I’m hosed.
This is the first time they’ve been suing emulator developers.
Yeah! And they’ve been so cool and supportive of the gaming community thus far, <3 nintendo https://www.thegamer.com/a-snapshot-of-nintendos-convoluted-legal-history/
There were so many Nintendo apologists when Yuzu was taken down because “Yuzu used actual nintendo source code, so that’s why they were taken down, it won’t happen to Ryujinx.” Yet here we are. Nintendo is by far the shittiest company when it comes to protecting their IP, because it’s all they have. Turns out, Mario is a fucking bootlicker
I don’t understand how people think getting rid of emulators is good. Having emulators is better as a consumer than not having them at all, since it can give gamers more ways to play their games and might incentivize Nintendo to add features to compete with emulators (think better res and fps, mod support, save states, no online requirement).
Because a subset of people are and always will be idiots. Remember: some people think unions exist to steal your money, socialism is communist dictatorship propaganda, and privatization of government services is good for everybody.
Nintendo fanboys are a special breed of stupid, arguing with them about Nintendo’s policies and anti consumer practices is just a wasted effort.
Yuzu did not use “nintendo source code”.
They simply hosted decryption keys in their repository. But that still was not the focus of Nintendo’s move. It was that Yuzu and its company profited directly from the release of The Legend of Zelda.
Makes sense, what was the focus on their move here?
It’s still not clear what their request entailed.
Although the real root reason, is likely the near release of Switch 2 and the consequent need to be as clean as possible for investors.
Well he is always saving the monarchy. Should have been kinda obvious 👑
Saving one monarchy from another.
Yeah but Bowser at least gives his subjects free healthcare. Sometimes even brings them back to life. When have you seen a skeletoad?
True. The only time we’ve seen a Toad’s skeleton is when they’re electrocuted in Mario Strikers Charged.
because it’s all they have
I’m not quite sure you fully understand what you said here, given your surrounding arguments. Nintendo literally cannot exist if they allow emulators without becoming just another Sony/Microsoft. And they cannot realistically compete against those two.
fuck Nintendo and fuck fanboys who defend them at every turn. breath of the wild was a 7/10 game
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I’ve hated every cartoony zelda ever made. I will die playing LttP over and over again.
Link Between Worlds was awesome as well.
I would consider that cartoony as well. You might disagree but that’s ok. I’m not trying to pretend like my opinion is popular, it’s just how I personally feel.
All the more reason to buy their next system at V1.0 with 0 games.
…keep it in the box for a year and keep an eye on a hack hitting the news.
Botw is easily a 9/10 for me . Totk too. I really like Nintendos take on open world. However, I still appreciate the other Zelda games a lot and I hope they don’t completely abandon that linear formula
The world is interactive but bland. Except a few scenic vistas, there’s nothing interesting about the botw’s open world.
I desperately wanted a switch 2 and been gaming on my mac using emu and a handful of native games until release.
But at this point I’ll probably pick up the ps5 or steam deck just to avoid these folks ^
The Steam Deck is a great option, I have a hub to be able to play on my TV, and don’t tell Nintendo, but a lot of Switch games run nicely.
I have an SD full of every NES-N64 game with a bunch of GameCube thrown in too, it’s a beautiful thing. Plus gyro on old GameCube games is pretty funny
Lol great advice, probably runs them better and SD card sounds like a dream
I say this as a die-hard 3D Zelda fan:
I was soooo boooored in BOTW! There was no current main story. It all happened in the past. You’re basically playing through the climax the entire time. And I hated it. I mainly play Zelda for the story, and this was a very poorly told one.
TOTK was somewhat better because it gave us better characters (I will die for Tulin), a bit better characterization (I enjoyed Zelda getting a lot more fleshed out this time), and a somewhat better story… but there were still way too many reused story beats. That is to say, the story was fleshed out much better, but they still reused the overall story structure from BOTW (get the memories fight the four bosses in the four temples, etc.). They did add a fifth temple and a mid-game story thing, but that’s mostly it. They also didn’t even acknowledge how similar some things were to their counterparts in BOTW (ex. the
MaliceGloom), which really bothered me. Also, some stuff just felt… unfinished. Like the reporter bird who, by the end of it all, just ends up pondering and trying to figure himself out… and that’s it. It felt like setup for DLC, but there wasn’t any.… That was a very unintentionally long rant.
To summarize: hated BOTW; somewhat enjoyed TOTK, though it could’ve been much better.
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You know ratings are inherently subjective right?
yeah I probably overrated it
BOTW is not a real Zelda game IMHO.
‘offered an agreement’
So bribed them?
Probably more of a “Do x, y, and z and we agree not to sue you about it”
If Nintendo is smart, they should offer a job. Those guys most probably know more about those systems than many of their employees. And also Nintendo develops emulators for their online service. They could clearly profit by hiring them.
Make good sense
They sent people to his house
I’m Brazil
motherfucker had goons sicced on him
I’m Brazil
hi Brazil, I’m Dad!
Hi dad, I’m Brazil 💪😟💪
FWIW Brazil has the largest population of Japanese people outside of Japan.
Honestly that in itself sounds illegal. What was the emulator’s license? The guy taking the money isn’t the only code contributor.
I’m a bit salty this was apparently announced through Discord. Was it even posted anywhere else?
The future of social media is fragmented siloes, I guess.
I wouldn’t have an issue with many different communications platforms if they didn’t all require an account (also Discord not being indexable sucks).
Discord is even worse, as you need to find an invite to a specific Discord, and sometimes go through a lengthy sign up process for each Discord.
Some won’t let you sign up without a phone #.
I will never not be pissed off that the overwhelming majority of communities that made the internet vibrant especially when nerding out about niche stuff just happily moved to discord and foreclosed their futures.
Everytime I get down on the fediverse I think about what discord did to online communities I loved and I get fired up again.
I think eventually if a federated system (or particular server) gets too popular they will just defederate from everyone else and perpetuate the same problem all over again
Fragmentation is a concern but it isn’t the real issue, the issue is corporate capture of the commons as far as I am concerned.
Yeah, this is a big part of why I stopped using discord recently. Not yet sure of any alternatives but leaving is step one.
Matrix.
And… Lemmy.
It doesn’t matter though, the problem is the critical mass is migrating to Discord and shunting everything out of view. Honestly that’s much worse than being on Reddit, even now.
Matrix does not have seamless desktop sharing or voice chat, and has a drastically higher executive cost. It also does not solve the information silo issue.
The fediverse as a whole is promising but likely needs to mature a bit longer. Theres a lot of potential issues that have yet to be worked through.
Yeah, why don’t they send an owl to each interested party?
Some of us like to be contacted via cute and fluffy snow owls…
You are a wizard Joe!..
…but an average one.
Yeah… even worse, it appears the admin didn’t even announce it, this is just one of the developers clarifying what the admin probably did.
As someone who uses Ryujinx, I literally spent the afternoon curious about an error I was getting while updating about the build server being down “probably because it’s building a new version, check back in a few minutes”, only to find a Twitter screenshot of this linked in slack that evening.
Twitter screenshot of this linked in slack that evening.
The modern internet in a nutshell, lol.
As with Yuzu, I won’t be buying any more switch games. I’ll still be playing switch games, and so will my friends, but we won’t my buying them.
Honestly, I’ve lived watching emulators for decades. They can come and go and there’s always more, even ones that aren’t forks. Just today I was reminiscing on my first emulators, zsnes, no$gmb and nesticle. Y’all remember the peaceful zsnes snowfall? Good times.
I used all of those. Nesticle had that bloody hand as a cursor. Also, Genecyst for Sega Genesis/Master System emulation.
Remember when emulation really blew up after UltraHLE successfully ran Ocarina of Time? That was when I first became aware of emulators (IIRC, it was front page news on IGN). Nintendo filed a lawsuit and took UltraHLE down, but we all know how that turned out (at this point, I believe I’ve lost count of how many N64 emulators were developed in the ensuing years). This recent Yuzu/Ryujinx drama is just history repeating itself. Emulation will never die.
There’s a very very interesting story about nesticle but unfortunately I’ve forgotten it. Some kind of drama, a bit edge lord stuff, and I think someone died? It’s actually one of the first emulators, ever, though.
It was a very niche community back then though, long before IGN caught wind. Weird I only found out because of a crazy conspiracy theory uncle, though. Thanks for reminding me about UltraHLE, though!
I have a vague recollection about the Nesticle drama, but also don’t recall the details.
I know the emulator scene precedes UltraHLE by at least several years. Publicity around UltraHLE just made it somewhat mainstream, and Nintendo learned first-hand about the Streisand effect, lol!
People think emulator protections in the law are stronger than they really are. Sony vs Connectix made emulation legal, but it wasn’t heard by the supreme court. PS1 games weren’t encrypted and relied on other methods like disc wobble to prevent piracy…so without proactively violating any measures you could just not include that check in your competing emulator and play retail discs without breaking any laws.
In steps the DMCA anti-circumvention laws for bypassing video game / console encryption measures, which is an even bigger untested minefield without precedent in favor of emulation. And since games are default encrypted on new consoles and arguably not subject to exemption (at least while still supported) it really might be a disaster to fight it.
Nintendo is a dick but it’s not in our interest or theirs to really push the boundary on the status quo. The get to slap suit whatever they want taken down, we get to play the emulation hydra game where it’s still legally grey.
Personally I don’t give a flying Fuck what the law says, breaking copyright is the only thing preventing the world from being more of a dystopian nightmare with subscription mice and trains that break down if you take them to a mechanic and I can’t wait for someone in china or India to take the Open source code and make a better emulator.
I care what the law says if it’s wrong.
I don’t much care of what is said, when it is just. I’m more concerned with those who claim to know the difference
If they had an actual plan or history of preserving games I’d not care about emulator development. But with the industry track record being so poor we need emulators if for nothing else for preservation.
So much culturally interesting data has already been lost to time which I bet future historians would absolutely love to have access to. The internet archive is missing much of the early internet, while old iPhone and Android apps are largely unable to be run even if you have the APK/IPA required,
I own a Nintendo, and I haven’t used it in years. I bought some games which were ridiculously priced compared to what I was used to on steam. I’m rather annoyed they keep their games console exclusive for this reason, they have like a monopoly of a market they control, it feels.
I was gonna get some more games to put on it, but with then shutting down these emulators, I think I’ll use one of those instead. Fuck Nintendo.
Yeah I haven’t used my switch in a long time. I think I might have power surged it, but I don’t really care enough to even double check.
I have a switch emulator on my external HD along with a bunch of other emulators. When I get my next PC I’ll just play whatever switch games I want on that.
Even having a switch, I still prefer to dump the games and play them on steamdeck. That way, I can just bring one device for gaming.
Even is emulation is not perfect on the steamdeck, I’m still happy to play at lower performance or with some graphical glitches for the convenience.
I have a bunch of emus. Does the deck let you put them in your library as a non steam game and play them? That’s how I have them setup on my PC.
Yes. There are a couple different ways to do that.
Ok cool. That’s one of my main concerns with it.
Just hack it
It’s supported by LineageOS lol. You could repurpose it as a tablet to stream steam games.
No need to install Android for that, there is a native Moonlight port for the switch. Will get you better performance and battery life than trying to do the same thing with Android
Oh I didn’t realize that’d be an option. Where shall I start?
Thanks!
Obligatory fuck Nintendo, but I also blame the selfish dumbfucks who keep posting videos of themselves playing unreleased games on YouTube and Reddit. If you want nice things contingent on having software which exists in a legal gray area, don’t openly poke the litigious hornets’ nest.
That’s inevitable though, blame them all you want those people will always exist
I need to remind some people here who don’t seem to understand something.
Forks may be dead and development may not be as fast as the original.
However - you must think about the future and not the situation right now. Yuzu and Ryujinx sources will be invaluable information for people making emulators later down the line.
It’s a matter of when and not if someone picks it up again.
Agree. Was thinking exactly the same this afternoon. If there would be a new generational console evolution (like it happened from the Wii to the Switch), then the when would be much faster. However, since it seems Nintendo is going for a Switch 2, I am just sad that Switch emulators will be halted for several years :/
Yeah hopefully.
I said this in another thread; I hope whoever picks it up keeps their dev team anonymous or prepares to enter this era’s legal battle, especially since it was supposedly already decided with an old Sony lawsuit against emulators.
btw. Were they opensource?
Yes, both Yuzu and Ryujinx were open source.
Ryujinx is licensed under MIT and Yuzu is under GPLv3.
Huh, just realized Yuzu was GPLv3. That’s weird. Citra was GPLv2 and Yuzu is a Citra fork. Some of the Citra devs were Yuzu developers, but not all of them, so I wonder how they handled the relicensing. Yuzu had a CLA attributing copyright to the creators, so that wouldn’t have been a problem, but Citra had not such thing.
Yeah, this is dumb.
I own original hardware and buy 100% of my games but sometimes you just wanna run games that aren’t originally crossplatform on your Steamdeck for convenience, or on a PC with resolution upscaling, or for ease of streaming the gameplay, or tons of other legitimate reasons.
Nintendo has some great IP and gameplay, and I guarantee you their sales are not meaningfully hurt by people who pirate/emulate games. Those people were never their customers anyway. If anything the emulation community enabled streamers to boost the popularity of their games. (People like PointCrow did more for the sustained popularity of BOTW than all of Nintendo’s marketing efforts combined)
A lot of people resort to emulation simply so they can play mods too.
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Yep, sure do.
keeps pirating
Those are two different situations.
There isn’t enough paying for shit that’s gonna make a mod run in an unmodified console. You can find people who have bought every single Pokémon game ever, and they still want to play romhacks and randomizers and such.
There’s something to be said about how willing people are to pay and whether they admit it or why. But sounds more like you don’t want to believe there’s any other reason to do it.
Eh, you’re applying generalizations universally. These last couple weeks, I literally bought Zelda Echoes of Wisdom day one, even bought NSO vouchers so I can buy the next big game that comes out. Day one, I dumped the game from my own modded switch, and started playing it on Ryujinx rather than on my Switch.
I modded the game to change the resolution to always 1080p native, remove the double buffered vsync issue to smooth out the framerate and let VRR work, boosted LODs for better distant assets, and swapped the UI for Xbox controls. Ryujinx also let me play at 2x internal resolution, so I could run the game at native 4k.
My game looks sharper, runs smoother, and is a lot of fun to tinker with. I’ve had a blast checking gamebanana every day for new mods, or for Ryujinx patches. I love it, and I’m preferring that experience to Switch. I’m also getting fun stuff like discord rich presence, and being able to record with my GPU driver, stream my gameplay to discord, play with a controller I prefer to a Pro Controller, everything.
I’m also looking forward to tinkering with mods for unlimited echoes once I beat the game. I’m more than happy to pay for the game, but this is much more fun for me, and trades blows with the real hardware experience well enough that I’d much rather play here than on Switch.
I own original hardware and buy 100% of my games but sometimes you just wanna run games that aren’t originally crossplatform on your Steamdeck for convenience, or on a PC with resolution upscaling, or for ease of streaming the gameplay, or tons of other legitimate reasons.
Can’t wait until our courts decide that, due to the prevalence of “remasters” that are just upscaled ROMs running on emulators, that this is no longer considered “fair use.”
Fair use has nothing to do with this. Fair use has to do with distributing a copyrighted work. Emulators are (ideally) running completely original code that isn’t copied from the company’s source code. This is why, for example, PCSX2 has you use “your own” PS2 BIOS instead of including it.
The PS2 BIOS is copyrighted, so it’s illegal to distribute it (and it’s never been “fair use” to distribute it). But it’s not illegal to do whatever you want with it (including dump it) as long as you own the console you’re dumping it from and as long as you don’t upload it to the internet for the purpose of distributing it to others. As far as the law is concerned, you bought the console and can do to it whatever you wish, provided you keep it to yourself and don’t distribute it to others.
Games fall under the same category. You’re free to dump your games and play them however you wish, provided you don’t distribute the dumped game to other people. However, companies are also free to implement measures (DRM) to stop you from doing that as much as possible, likely because they know more people would illegally distribute them if they didn’t.
I’m one of those weirdos who actually dumps all my own games with my own modded launch Switch mainly for preservation purposes.
But then TotK came out and performed so poorly on the console itself, I exported my save to play on PC and Steam Deck. Every part of my Switch emulation journey has been legal and by-the-book: dumped my own firmware, my own keys, and my own games.
Fuck Nintendo for bullying these developers.
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I was one of them but I also had my physical game pre-ordered so…
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And I guarantee a lot, if not most, of those people didn’t even have Switches. If Nintendo had released a PC version they would have sold a ton more.
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No, because if they wanted a Switch, they would have bought one.
But that’s on Nintendo. For those people the game doesn’t cost $70, it costs $200+ even if they buy a used Switch lite. Nintendo is deliberately leveraging their games to make people buy their console when those people just want to buy the game.
They want to have their cake and eat it too, and that is most likely one of the biggest reasons people pirated TOTK.
leveraging their games to make people buy their console when those people just want to buy the game
That’s the whole point of exclusive titles and every console vendor does it.
Everybody doing it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bad thing for customers and a reason for piracy.
All of Microsoft’s games are also on PC and even Sony has been putting many of their games there a year later. Nintendo’s the only one left that locks all of them to their console forever.
If I download a pirated game it’s because I don’t intend to pay for it. It’s a choice between pirating and not playing it at all. Sometimes I like the game so much that I do end up buying a legit copy too, but that wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t get to play it first.
For Switch in particular it’s because I’m a PC gamer and can’t get used to playing games on console. I do own a Switch, but I find it inconvenient to use vs the PC. I played a lot more on the emulator than I did on the real thing.
I know it’s not happening, but I’d love it if Nintendo went the way of Sega, and just made games. They’ve always been hit and miss with their consoles anyway, it’s the games people love. Just fuck it, start releasing games for multiple platforms and focus on what you’re actually fucking good. Pipe dream, I know
I imagine Nintendo could make a tonne selling Zelda games for PC for 1.5x what they normally charge, simply for performance and controller compatibility.
Right?
If they hate emulators so much, why aren’t they selling native x86 versions?
they could even sell a VM image as they’ve proven it still runs better virtualised on other machines than it does native on theirs
"Hey we released this new game buuuuut you’re going to need to purchase an entire separate computer system we call a ‘console’ because we refuse to compile the game binary for PC OSes, nor provide the source for you to do so yourself”
I interpret distributors and publishers treating me as a second (or third) class citizen as carte blanche to acquire your content and make the necessary changes to make it work on my environment of choice.
an entire separate computer system we call a ‘console’
I get it; I even tend to like their consoles. The Switch is fantastic for what it is, when it came out (though admittedly: I am more likely to buy a Steam Deck than a Switch 2, at least as of now, not knowing the Switch 2’s specs).
But either sell an x86 build, or get over emulators. Or develop a taste for my favourite cocktail, if you can’t pick between the other two options
Don’t switch games already cost more than PC games, I kinda doubt people would be willing to pay even more.
Depends on your country but switch games range 50-70 € and pc games are more like 10-100€ but with ones comparable to Switch games mostly 30-60€. So yes mostly, but they’re not that far off that they would definitely do poorly.
I don’t think a lot of people would buy e.g. BotW for 100 bucks.
Nintendo DS and Switch are the second and third most sold consoles ever, respectively. Gameboy and GB Colour comes in fourth of you count them together. Wii is sixth or seventh depending on if you group the above.
I think people like their consoles.
Oh I know they do great on some (most?) of their consoles, but I still think they do better at actual games than they do at consoles. Also, aren’t consoles almost always money losers, anyway? Like, they take a hit so that they can sell more games, which actually make them the money? Or is Nintendo the exception to that rule or thumb?
They’ve had some flops…Wii U, DSi, Virtualboy…but they ain’t no game.com. Way more hits than misses in the console realm.
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Now and then I bought Nintendo games for my nephew. This stopped right now.
I mean. I understand the sentiment but I don’t think your nephew will understand 😅 you should keep buying games for your nephew bro. I’ll stop buying games in his place
I’m sure there’s plenty of other things they’d appreciate too. Maybe instead they could help them move over to PC even.
Teach your nephew about the evilness of Nintendo and why he shouldn’t support them anymore.
Get him a MIG!
the plane?
The Flashcart. But I’ll take the plane!
I think anyone still in the scene will want to lay low for a while and work in the shadows. Only releasing after a few years.
I hope they dont go for dolphin or cemu claiming that certain games are in their e-shop for the switch 2 release.
Either way I think we should start backing up emulators and their source and require files regularly as a fallback.
I hope they dont go for dolphin or cemu claiming that certain games are in their e-shop for the switch 2 release.
That’s exactly what I’m afraid of
I mean, all of these emulators are already very well archived and available from several sources, not to mention downloaded to the devices of millions of people. I highly doubt we would be in danger of losing any of them even if Nintendo were to sue literally all of them overnight. Well, except for things like Github issues and pull requests, nobody bothers to archive those unfortunately.
But yeah, IMO the danger is moreso that the attacks are leading to a massive chilling effect and loss of developer talent in the emulation community.
